ecently, Jan Petersen  wrote in to ask, "When did dips for chips first become popular?" With the Super Bowl just around the corner, we're interested in delving into the history of these gridiron staples. Jan's question may sound like a version of the old conundrum about chickens and eggs — at least as regarding which came first — but in this case there is an answer.

If you look through cookbooks before the 1950s, you won't find any mention of dips. For example, in the appetizer section of the 1947 edition of Fannie Farmer's The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook, there are some cocktail spreads, which were intended for use with canapés or hors d'oeuvres built on crackers. Farmer also includes a paragraph on a Mayonnaise Cocktail Bowl, which was something like our crudités: a bowl of mayonnaise, flavored with mustard or Worcestershire sauce, surrounded by raw cauliflower florets, canned artichoke hearts, cooked or canned asparagus tips, cooked or canned shrimp, or lobster pieces. However, there's no mention of chips — and certainly nothing resembling our modern notion of a dip.

The Oxford English Dictionary shows the earliest appearance in print of the word "dip," in our sense of the word, to be in 1960. In James Kirkwood's book There Must be a Pony!, the OED found this telling sentence: "We were up to our necks in dips: clam dip, cheese dip, mushroom dip." Obviously, something occurred between 1947 and 1960 that changed the word, and the substance it named, from nonexistent to all-too-common.

Actually, three things happened.

First, the chip. While potato chips are almost a century older (they were invented in Saratoga Springs, NY, in 1853), they didn't become standard American snack fare until much later. In the 1920s, mechanical potato peeling machines made it possible to produce so-called "Saratoga Chips" in large quantities. The chips were introduced to a new audience in the deep South by a traveling salesman named Herman Lay. By 1944, Lay's now-famous name began appearing on bags of potato chips all over the country.

Meanwhile, in 1932, a young Texan name Elmer Doolin bought the rights to a variation on fried corn tortilla strips. He added an "s" to the Spanish word for "fried," and called them "Fritos." After World War II, Doolin's business grew to the point where he decided to sell franchises. Herman Lay's company bought the first one. By 1961 the two companies had merged, forming Frito-Lay, the largest snack-food manufacturer in the country.

Frito-Lay chips were soon everywhere, but what about their dancing partner: the dip? According to writer John Mariani, in the mid-nineteenth century, the word "dip" referred to a sauce of pork fat served on fish. By last century, it referred to a sauce for puddings, and "dipping" or "dippy" referred to both a gravy or sauce to dip meats into or a sweet sauce for desserts. It wasn't until the ‘50s that dips were sauces guests dipped savory or salty snack foods into.

The mass production and mass marketing that made The Frito Company and H. W. Lay's & Company successes were also at work in other food industries. The Lipton Company had pushed its instant soup business to its probable limit by 1952, and — if the business were to grow — new uses for its products had to be found. The company began a campaign that taught people to combine their undiluted soup mix with sour cream. While the new mixture could have been used with crudités, like Fannie Farmer's Mayonnaise Cocktail Bowl, the combination of the cool, tangy dip with crisp and salty chips was too perfect to be ignored.

The third thing that happened was a change in the way that Americans lived.

American homes had long had a room near the front of the house that was reserved for reading or playing music or for more formal occasions, including funerals. The room was called a "parlor," and the name still carries connotations of dignified formality. People would not think of eating in the parlor — they ate at a table, in their kitchen or dining room, with plates, utensils, and table linens. They faced each other and even spoke to each other.

Then, in the 1920s, funeral parlors — outside the home — became the standard place for dealing with the dearly departed, and one of the reasons for the existence of the home parlor was removed. By the ‘30s, radio became part of family life, and people began to share their parlor with the likes of characters such as Fibber McGee and Molly. The room began to lose its prim and proper edge, even if the name did not. By the '40s, architects began to speak of "living-dining rooms," reflecting the move away from the restricted sense of the old parlor.

Then, in the '50s, Americans began their love affair with the cathode-ray tube. With the advent of television, the staid parlor was forever transformed into something else: a living room.

Americans loved watching their (newly televised) sports in their living room — the place where, more and more, they actually lived. However, they soon discovered that while sitting on a couch for hours on end was hungry work, it was, strangely enough, not ideally suited for a sit-down meal. Instead of facing each other, everyone sat looking in the same direction. Rather than speaking with each other, everyone's attention was glued to the box that emitted the now-familiar eerie blue light.

Utensils were yet another undesirable distraction from "the tube." What were needed were more — and more convenient — finger foods. Chips, which served as both food and eating utensils for the new dips, almost perfectly met the needs of an emergent couch-potato class.

I suppose I could have answered Jan's question with just two words: "the '50s." However, food history trivia is addictive. It's like the old potato chip commercial that challenged: "I bet you can't eat just one."

That's a bet I always lose.